Sunday, 12 August 2007

Model Building Month

Today the TH Institute "New Physics and the LHC" kicks off here at CERN. As the organizers put it, it will be mostly targeted to model-builders, with the participation of string theorists and collider phenomenologists. Regardless of that looming participation, the program looks quite promising. After the dog days of summer you can count on more activity in this blog in the coming weeks.

Also today, on the other end of the world began Lepton-Photon'07. I wouldn't bother to mention if not for certain rumours. Rumours of rumours, so to say. I mean the rumours of the alleged non-standard higgs signal at the Tevatron whispered from blog to blog since May. The new rumour is that the relevant multi-b channel analysis will be finally presented at that conference. In spite of the fact that there are neither photons nor leptons in the signal :-)

Update: well....nothing like that seems to have happened. My deep throat turned out shallow. So we are left to rumours and gossips for some more time....Update #2: Finally, only CDF presented a new analysis of that channel. Their excess is 1.5 only sigma. Details in this public note, a wrap-up by Tommaso here. Now we're waiting for D0. Come on guys, dont be ashamed...

8 comments:

Anonymous
said...

"The new rumour is that the relevant multi-b channel analysis will be finally presented at that conference."

The PDF of the slides for "SUSY/Non SM Higgs searches" is still showing the old D0 result, so I doubt this is true....

D0 didn't present any update for this channel at the Fermilab seminar last Friday. However, CDF at long last has released preliminary results which are in the SUSY/Non-SM Higgs talk. The "striking results" talk is a catchall so that both D0 and CDF can each have three speakers, it does not have any special significance.

This rumor mongering is getting ridiculous. I walk the trailers of both CDF and D0. There is no smoking gun. Fluctuations, sure, but there are always fluctuations. The problem with this is that any Higgs result now that has anything less then a signal will be a disappointment. This is quite unfair to the physicists involved. Unfortunately, I think this will play out exactly as we have guessed. The Tevatron has a chance at 3 sigma evidence if we combine both CDF and D0 measurements at the end of the Tevatron's life cycle.

About Résonaances

Résonaances is a particle physics blog from Paris. It's about the latest news and gossips in particle physics and astrophysics. The posts are often spiced with sarcasm, irony, and a sick sense of humor. The goal is to make you laugh; if it makes you think too, that's entirely on your own responsibility...